Report: Blogs And Free Content Are Hurting B-To-B Publishers

Newspaper companies and business trade publishers face disruption from online competitors such as Google and Yahoo.

The news and trade market is in for some rough weather, according to report released Monday by researchers at Outsell Inc. Traditional segment leaders--newspaper companies and business trade publishers--face disruption from online competitors such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

"News and trade services are two of the most severely impacted markets hit by the dynamo that is the search world," says Chuck Richard, VP and lead analyst at Outsell, a research and advisory firm.

Revenue for the news and trade market reached $89.5 billion in 2004, up 8.7% from 2003. Outsell predicts growth of perhaps half that in 2005.

For traditional news and trade companies, the problem is that ad revenue per user is much higher in print than online. So as audiences migrate online, there's less ad revenue per user.

Richard expects online ads will become more valuable and print ads will become less so. "In the long run, people will value online ads more and as they reallocate their budgets, it will drive down the cost of print ads," he says.

News and trade companies, meanwhile, are likely to continue acquiring online shopping, social-networking, and blogging-related companies in an effort to expand their businesses online.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.